Summer Settles In

 

Down here in Texas, thirty miles north of Dallas.

We’ve begun the Dog Days of Summer (which traditionally begins in August, but here we’re about two months’ ahead of the northeast in heat), with temperatures firmly in the upper 90s. Not bad, since I expect July will be 31 days of 100-plus temps, but the humidity is a little more oppressive than I remember from the past two summers.

Which is slightly less than optimal, as I’m beginning my first major home ownership project tomorrow (I’ve taken a PTO day Friday and have the entire weekend). I’m re-staining the fence that perimeters my backyard. We measured it before buying all the stain needed, and though I forgot the exact numbers, it’s a six-foot fence about a hundred or so feet in length, and both sides need to be done. I expect it will take all weekend, though I want to get the majority of the work done early in the mornings and in the evenings if possible.

Other than that its been a slow June. We had excitement for Patch’s Confirmation and Father’s Day, and Little One’s college roommate is in town taking classes over the summer, so she visits on occasion. Last Sunday we went to mass at the college campus and were pleasantly surprised at the reverence shown by clergy and laypeople alike. Little One goes to a Catholic college which takes its Catholicity seriously, unlike more larger, well-known “Catholic” colleges such as Notre Dame or Georgetown.

I’m currently a third into my favorite Clancy novel, The Sum of All Fears, my introduction to the literary Jack Ryan first read in the Fall of ’94. After that I have two remaining Clancy novels to plow through, Debt of Honor and Executive Orders, which should take me to mid-September. Then I think a detour into Westerns, as I picked out three L’Amours and Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry for $11. For Halloween I plan on returning to Clive Barker, as I did a few years’ back. Not sure about November and December. Maybe I’ll give Asimov’s Foundation novels a third go (it’s the only Asimov I’ve never been able to crack in my youth), or The Illuminatus Trilogy, another omnibus that defeated me about ten or twelve years ago.

As far as nonfiction goes, I’ve been winding my way through an 1,800-page exegesis on the Bhagavad Gita. Nine summers ago I read Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light which piqued an interest in Hindu lore and mythology and I read a shorter Gita back then. This one kinda jumped off the library shelf at me two weeks ago, and, well, now I’m closing in on page 400.

After that I’m not sure what nonfiction I’ll take up. Possibly Bruce Catton’s Mr. Lincoln’s Army, which I picked up when we visited my sister-in-law in Idaho in March of 2022. A blogger I’ve been reading for 15+ years is a Civil War buff (among many side hobbies he writes about) and that caused me to consider Catton, staring down at me in silent condemnation at my twenty-seven months of neglect. In November, however, I decided to read the thousand-page A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, published in 1965 and winner of the Pulitzer Price a year later. This is in preparation for a visit to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza, which we’ve finally vowed to see this fall.

The girls are enjoying summer so far, having been out of school for about six weeks now. Halfway point will be the Fourth of July next week. We might go attend a minor-league ball game where we can swim in a pool in the outfield and watch fireworks afterwards, a repeat of what we did last year. It’s nice that Little One has her license now, as she takes my car to get dinner, drive Patch around, and drive to her college to hang with her roomie every now and then (and not to mention drive to work when I’m home remote).

The wife is currently in Austin until Friday evening. She’s doing such a good job that her superiors expanded her territory to almost the entirety of Texas and Oklahoma too. So on occasion she needs to drive out to Austin and spend a few days there visiting her people. Which is good for the family; more territory = more volume = more commission = greater bonus payout.

Me, I’m still at my corporate job doing my boring corporate thing. I’ve also taken on more responsibilities, but that only translated in a 4 percent raise. Which means I’m still making less money when I started due to inflation, but not as less as I could be making. Thanks Joe Biden. But even better, I’ve noticed the whole woke thing is starting to die out. “DEI out.” Thank God. Pride Month came and went with a tenth of the fanfare the company gave it last year, the same for Juneteenth. With any luck it’ll be gone next year and the company can focus on its real mission and allow its employees to work to accomplish that, without all this time wasting side nonsense.

Anyway, that’s pretty much a general update here in northeast Texas. Hope things are all going well with you all. Read something fantastic today!

 

Father's Day 2024

 

 

Was quite relaxing and enjoyable, as it usual is down here. I woke early and went for a mile-and-a-half walk listening to an upbeat podcast then the family went to mass at 11. Got back a little after noon and the Mrs. heated up some quiche for us all. I’m old enough to remember all that anti-quiche goofiness in the early 80s, but, dammit, yeah it was fluffy but the pie had eggs, cheese, and bacon in it, so I enjoyed it!

 

My goal was an unhurried, drama-free day, and that’s what the ladies gave me. A week ago my wife asked me for a dinner request, so I decided on stuffed shells and meatballs, and since she loves a challenge, she had to make it all from scratch. With help; Patch made the meatballs and is developing into quite the awesome little chef.

 

While all that was cooking in the oven we Facetimed my parents up in PA for a half-hour, then the Mrs. called her mom (her dad and stepdad both passed away in 2018). Then the girls had me open up cards and gifts. Patch bought me a record for my growing collection (just shy of 40 albums now) – Water Music Suite by Georg Handel, conducted by Pierre Boulez. Little One had a Rosary for me she picked up during her time in Rome in the spring and blessed by Pope Francis at one of the papal masses she attended. Awesome.

 

After dinner I was given the option of selecting a movie for all of us to watch together, and I chose M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, one of my favorite flicks of all time that I haven’t seen in at least five years. We all enjoyed it to varying lengths, especially the Mrs., who probably hadn’t seen it since we saw it way way back in 2002 in the theaters.

 

A great day of R & R, rest and relaxation, recovery and recuperation. And recharging. Because by Monday morning my two angels reverted back to two typical teens, though I realize I am blessed to have two typical teens that are not as typical as the typical teen out there.

Subatomic Universes

 

I have found the answer.

 

At least, an answer.

 

And, truth be told, I have heard this elsewhere in other iterations.

 

Ever since a little boy I was fascinated with atomic and subatomic particles. My dad and my brother would be watching the Mets on TV, and I’d be curled up on the rug memorizing the periodic table in my physics book. As I grew older, and before other interests took me, I wondered – what exactly is an electron made of? What makes up an elementary particle of matter?

 

I spent two years in my twenties studying physics at Seton Hall but never got up to the classes where such topics might be addressed. True, I knew about the wave-particle duality, how the electron acts as a particle when observed and a wave when not. True, I knew how electrons were categorized a fundamental unit called leptons and protons and neutrons were made up of fundamental particles called quarks. But what were they? If I could shrink my hands down to something like ten-to-the-negative-twentieth their size now and grab an electron like a snowball in my hand and squeezed, what would happen?

 

I’m finishing up Cosmos by Carl Sagan (a read about forty years overdue) and came across this:

 

There is an idea – strange, haunting, evocative – one of the most exquisite conjectures in science or religion. It is entirely undemonstrated; it may never be proved. But it stirs the blood. There is, we are told, an infinite hierarchy of universes, so that an elementary particle, such as an electron, in our universe would, if penetrated, reveal itself to be an entire closed universe. Within it, organized into the local equivalent of galaxies and smaller structures, are an immense number of other, much tinier elementary particles, which are themselves universes at the next level and so on forever – an infinite downward regression, universes within universes, endlessly. And upward as well. Our familiar universe of galaxies and stars, planets and people, would be a single elementary particle in the next universe up, the first step of another infinite regress.

- Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, page 221 of my paperback edition.

 

How neat does that sound? It gets the Hopper Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

 

My own semi-ignorant musings, however, tell me that somehow nanoscopic black holes are involved (thus the need to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics) and photons need to be tossed in (something I think physicist Roger Penrose writes extensively about).

 

However, I am probably wrong.

 

But it’s still fun to muse on.

 

Confirmation

 

 

What a whirlwind week. Your host is completely exhausted.

 

Patch had her confirmation this Saturday. Confirmation is a Sacrament of the Catholic Church where the confirmee receives the Holy Spirit and becomes a full-fledged member of the Church through a freely-made decision. This is a process that normally takes about a year of catechesis, but due to workload with school and other circumstances beyond her control, Patch had to take an extra year to get it done. Usually the sacrament is administered to 8th or 9th grade students, so she was one of the older confirmees.

 

We planned a celebration to reward her hard work by having guests fly in and going out to an early dinner on Saturday followed by cake and champagne and gift opening at home. Her two aunts and two cousins flew in from Idaho and Austin, and four of her school friends were invited. Little One and her college roommate were there, too. Sunday would be a brunch and a walk-around antiquing (Patch’s newest thing) until everyone would fly or drive home.

 

Since we haven’t entertained since November, the house was somewhat, er, hairy, to say the least. So in addition to our normal workloads, we spent the first few days this week putting things in their place, moving items from the downstairs to their proper places upstairs, then vacuuming, sweeping, swiffering, and dusting the entire first floor. The dog, his crate, and his blankets all got washed. The ping pong table was cleaned and prepped. The lawn was mowed and hedges trimmed.

 

The mass took two hours Saturday morning, due mainly to Father Rudy’s extended homily (we like him a lot but he can be a little verbose) and the large group of confirmees – 60, each one of which stepped forward and had a cross anointed on his or her forehead and received a blessing. Normally the local bishop administers the sacrament, but Father Rudy had a dispensation to perform it himself because of the huge size of our diocese (this was just one of numerous confirmation masses).

 

Halfway through the baptismal font at the rear of the church spung a noisy leak. Ushers frantically began mopping and sweeping as the water line slowly crept forward. Those of us in the pews had to shift forward and to the side, and the center aisle was cordoned off, causing some traffic jams during communion. Our church is fairly new and very well-maintained and beautiful, so this is the first time in nearly three years anything like this has happened. Father Rudy recovered the ball at the mass’s conclusion, telling us and the young confirmees to take it as a Sign – even the waters of the baptismal font are springing forth with the power of the Holy Spirit and cannot be held back!

The rest of the weekend was delightful, though my social battery was soon drained. This was the first time the Mrs. and I got to really meet and interact with Patch’s friends, and they were lovely. My sister-in-law brought a guest who was a survivor of the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel, and that woman, a college friend of hers, brought her thirteen-month old baby daughter. The young cousins played ping pong all afternoon with the adults. Charlie the dog was medicated with his “special cheese,” but that did not slow him down. Around 6 half the group drove up a few blocks to the neighborhood swimming pool for an hour-and-a-half.

 

Sunday we drove to McKinney, Texas, an artsy enclave about a half-hour from us, to have brunch and then mosey around. There’s a record store that I patronize there, but, alas, I did not score anything. I did, however, find something much, much better, which I’ll blog about later this week.

 

We returned home to a quiet house around 3 and just chilled the remainder of the day. I caught up on my reading, my wife watched the horse races, the girls did their thing upstairs. Patch and I have been doing “Thursday Movie Night” for nearly two years, and this Thursday’s was moved to Sunday night due to all the house cleaning. The movie we watched was Fight Club, to which my wife laughed, “Happy confirmation Patch, welcome to the Church, now watch Brad Pitt beat people up!”

 

All in all, a good time had by all. Thankfully I’m working from home today.